You're listening to Redefining Energy. Your co hosts from Berlin Gerard Read and from London Laurent Sagalan. Today on readefin Energy, we're going to talk about EV charging, about time, Lauren. Yes, yeah. The two limiting factors for faster department of evs are the price of vehicles and the famous range anxiety. On one hand, we see the price of cars going down and the price of batteries going down, but there's also a lot of things happening in
the EV charging space. Well, absolutely, guys. We have to make it easier for customers, easier and quicker for customers to charge. And I think anyone who has had an EV has experienced this range anxiety. But first of all, from our partner Aquin, the Capital is a sustainable investment company headquarter ordered in Hamburg, Germany. I quit a capital invest in realisets such as clean energy, sustainable infrastructure, energy efficiency and growth private equity on behalf
of its clients. Yes, John, and you would believe that such an opportunity would be grasped by utilities or oil companies. They haven't done much in the autermotive sector. Only Tesla has is the opportunity so in the gap that was created, some entrepreneur jumped in and we see a lot of independently developed EV charging networks. Thank god, because you're absolutely right if you were relying on some of these utilities and oil companies, and I think we'd be here
from other century about the way. The crazy thing. I can get my head around the oil companies, but the utilities they sell electricity, they have grids. Why aren't they doing more? It's unbelievable. And when they do, the chargers are just not good enough. And I'm just not going to name name basically all the big utilities, and they're just awesome, absolutely awful. And I've been driving an EV for many years at this point in time. Yeah, So our guest today is Toddington Harper is the CEO of grit
Serve, which is a leading you get charging network. I'm looking forward to having on the show. Toddington. Great to have you on the show. It's awesome to be here. Well, listen, maybe i'd like to kick off. Listen. I've been driving an EV for many years and I'm just fed up of the quality of the EV charging infrastructure, right, And actually I just said something happen the other day, and I won't name the name of the utility, but like, I will never go to their EV chargers.
They keep telling me they have one hundred and twenty kW, and I never get more than fifty and sometimes you get forty and it's just so frustrating. But then actually I opened a Tesla account the other day and I started charging my BMW a Tesla and it was just it's just game change. I just went, Oh, my god, why can't they all be like that? So I suppose that's my question to you, why can they Why can't
EV chargers be like the Tesla charges. I don't know if you've checked out any of the new electric superharbs or electric four courts that grids of have been delivering recently, but I would suggest they are a lot of what we're doing is pretty world class. I guess to put some things in perspective for you,
I'm now ten years in on my EV journey this year. Bought my first electric car in twenty fourteen, and I experienced a lot of challenges along the way along the journey, and so with kind of all of that experience that I garnered over, you know, lots of experiences I made it a real commitment that what we were going to livel as well class charging infrastructure, and so every single charger that we've put into the ground has had contactless payment
as a starting point. People can turn up, plug in, get the vehicle charged. And actually the majority of what we're focusing are three hundred and fifty killer what charges and if you look at what grids have have done over the last three years, started by launching Braintree Electric four Court, which is probably one of the most awesome pieces of electric charging infrastructure that exists at the
time, which was subsequently built on it. But shortly after that we then acquired the Electric Highway, which was a ten year old charging network, great locations across motorways, but very old chargers. What we did is one hundred and thirty days after acquiring that network, we've changed the charges on one hundred and thirty sites. That meant we couldn't upgrade the grid that those sites. We were still capped the amount of power that was available, but at least
the charges worked and they were reliable. Subsequently, what we've been doing is we've been upgrading those sites with huge numbers of what we call electric superhubs. So these are groups of chargers, typically six or more charging bays three hundred and fifty and now three hundred and sixty killer what charges with brand new grid connections that can push huge amounts of power. We have dynamic power as well, so if there is a limited grid connection, we can assign the amount
of power that's available to the right charger when it's needed. We've been boosting sites with batteries. We've been building solar farms to generate clean energy and provide net zero energy for the network. We're now charging almost two hundred thousand vehicles
every single month with clean energy. We've got a very reliable network and I think if you take a journey across the motorway network across the UK and please do this, and you stop at any electric superhubs, you know, hopefully you will get a lot of confidence about what we're doing and actually give more confidence for people who haven't yet made that transition to be able to do so well well does it? Thank you very much? The podcast it's finished.
In the last four month, we've delivered more than thirty new electric superhubs, mostly across the motorway network to put some of that perspective in there, So I think a lot of what we're doing is happening far ahead of what people realize is happening. I like what I heard because there are things that you don't say, and I want to say. It is when it became clear and the other leadership of Tesla, Charles said that there was a business case
around IV charging. Okay, probably the first move would charge at home,
but very happily people would charge outside the home. There was a business case, and utilities did not grasp it. Oil companies certain started moving, but of course there are kind of slow So in fact, it's entrepreneur like you who took the challenge and you come from the world of solar of battery, So can you kind of explain the genesis of gridserve kind of rapidly and how you grew Yeah, sure, prior to grid serve you very rapid form of
me. I was born into a world where my father was doing solar and battery projects for critical power applications before I was born. So he was doing that the forty seven years ago. And I'm not forty seven years old, and I've been building sustainable energy businesses for the last twenty two years prior to grid Serve, I built the UK arm of Electrics are one of the largest solar and battery businesses in the world. And during that time of developing,
constructing, financing, operating is really you know, incredible projects. I actually learned along the journey how much fossil fuels it takes to build these types of projects, and I thought that was wrong. And so when I had the first opportunity to drive an electric car, and my business partner, you know, it took me for a ride and without giving me any advance warning about how fast they were. It was a real shock to the system. But
I thought, wow, this is incredible. So I put a deposit down very very quickly, and I took ownership of the car abo about a year later, and it was fantastic. I mean, the vehicle was absolutely brilliant, but charging just was difficult. And you know, it was also at a time when the solar business we were kind of coming out of the subsidy era and a lot of people were thinking the solar industry is dead, it's
all based on subsidies. That was never my mindset, because, as I said, I was born into a mindset where, you know, when my dad was doing solar projects, subsidies didn't exist. You had to build renewable energy projects for infrastructure that depends on that energy, and it was for critical applications like telecoms, so it needs to be incredibly reliable. And actually, if you can provide that sort of energy that's incredibly reliable that infrastructure can depend
on, then there's inherent value. And I was very sure that that value is more than the value that we've just lost when the subsidies had gone. So I was focusing on new ways to deliver sustainable energy that were you andly sustainable without the requirement for subsidies. I was very sure that electric vehicles were phenomenal because I've been many years in but the charging infrastructure just wasn't up to
standard. And so we actually built the first non subsidized large hybrid solar farm in the UK, and we set about plans to really build something that's just
materially different, something that's ready for the mass market. And the business model is was that if we could use at the core solar energy, and we could put that solar energy either directly in or indirectly in net zero approach through the grid, then there would be additional value, and that would also allow us to we could build the instruction in an incredibly reliable way, then that would give people the confidence to transition to electric cars in the numbers that were
justified the investment required to really really scale up. And so that's what we've been doing, and a lot of it was borne out of just a lot of learning. The first journey I took was in a tesla to the south of France and back in August twenty fourteen. It was just an awful lot of experience, a huge number of experiences, and I had a lot of knowledge about so not of knowledge about batteries, and a lot of knowledge about
critical infrastructure, and also a good understanding about electric cars. And so what I felt is that the vehicles were going to be there. But people don't often do things because the government tells them they should. People eventually we have to, but to deliver change and impact quickly, we need to deliver things because people want to. And what you certainly don't want is the stories which you laid out at the beginning of the session of turning out to a charging
experience, and it was terrible. We needed to flip that on its head. We needed to make charging electric vehicles a better experience than petrol and diesels, because I'm sure the vehicles already are, and if the charging experience can be as well, that's where we need to be to attract the mass market, to give people the confidence the transition. So that's the mission that we're
on and have been since the beginning. Charlington, can I ask you just about another markets heavy one because I understand perfectly what you're doing in the mortal Way area, but I'd like to ask you a little bit about how you see cities. You know where I'm coming from. That is an old city like London, right, How do you go and put in charging infrastructure in there to allow us to electrify mobility within that type of big city environment.
It's difficult. So we focused on delivering a network and we've prioritized where there is the greatest need. So we focused on electric four courts, which serve local areas. But given the scale of them they're typically half an acre to two and a half acres, you can't have those in the middle of towns
and so those are typically on the edge of towns. We focus on the motorway service area areas which are already perfect for electric vehicle drivers, because in addition to a great charging experience, you also want to have the right place to safely and comfortably and have a good experience while you're charging. And we're also now increasingly turning our focus towards cities as well. Cities are very challenging.
They're challenging because you have an exponentially larger number of people who can't easily charge at home. It's because there's a lot less offstreet charging and the land is very expensive, and so really cities, the solution has to be based
on where vehicles would otherwise be parking anyway. And so there's a number of projects that we're working on that will be bringing to market in the pretty near future which we're very excited about how we can really help transform electric vehicle charging within cities as well. But but it really is all about not just trying to have to compete with new buildings, because that the economics just don't work.
It's about how you can get some an area where somebody would be parking their vehicle anyway, and how you can provide the right type of charging experience for that location or for how long the vehicle needs to be there. From a development perspective, do you have like criteria yah where you decide to build your new station. Is it a ability of connection, is it the traffic?
How do you decide to locate a new charging infrastructure. There's a huge amount to that and that's obviously absolutely critical because we also need to ensure that we don't just deliver the infrastructure, but that infrastructure is used to a level that will justify the business case and that will then give our our investors the confidence that we're making the right decisions, the right choices, so we can
go and deploy additional infrastructure. You know, we have raised many hundreds of millions of pounds both bank debt and equity of over a billion pounds totally if you look at all the different facilities, and you know, we've been able to get that level of confidence by being very very careful about where we site and where we choose location. So there's different criteria that you need to consider. So you know, on a motorway type scenario, it's you know,
there's a huge number of people going past. When we have more electric vehicles, you can predict the type of numbers of vehicles that will be turning up to charge utilization rates and so on. And we're already seeing a really great utilization given that the UK's now hit its first million electric cars, and as we step towards twenty thirty and beyond, it's going to step up a lot more when it comes to where we have our electric four courts. For example,
just open up a new electric four court at Gatwick Airport. You know, they have a slightly different scenario where there's a large number of people within that vicinity and those people will need charging. It's principally serving your local need. It's great that you can have a busy road in the vicinity so you can get some past through traffic as well, but really there's a huge business
case be able to serve the local community. In a slightly more residential area, then there are typically thirty to fifty percent, let's say, of homes that can't easily charge it, don't have off street parking, and so there's going to be a large number of people who need to know that they've got the confidence to be able to make their transition. There's obviously different types of
charging solutions. If a vehicle is going to be there overnight. Then you definitely don't want a three hundred and fifty kilo charger that's capable of providing one hundred miles a charge in five minutes. But you definitely need a mixture of solutions so that you can have slower charging for vehicles that are going to be there for a long period of time, but also higher power chargers, so
businesses in the area can make the transition to term their fleets electric. Big part of it is giving people the confidence as well that they can go out and get an electric car as well, knowing that they've got the right types of solutions available to them as well. And there's a very select approach that we go through. It's a very data driven approach. We map roads, we map power, we map in you know, there's a huge amount of
criteria that we map. We create a score as to how valuable that location is based on many, many diferent metrics, and we then pick one of
the most valuable sites to move forward with. And then we move forward with the approach of then you know, looking to secure the grid capacity, looking to get a bit of planning commissions and so on, and then the business cases alongside that to be able to fund that infrastructure, and thereafter delivering it and working, you know, looking very close to at how it's operating, and continuing to look at ways that we can continue to optimize that infrastructure thereafter.
In fact, we have a whole ecosystem. But approach to what we do. It's called sun to wheel. It's actually a net zero equivalent of well to wheel. So we build solar farms, we build batteries, we build grid infrastructure and connect to grids, build electric four courts and electric superhubs. So we also take all this into consideration whether it's possible to connect a solar farm, for example, we look at fleets in the area that there's
a variety of different types of solutions. And I believe we have one of the highest utilized networks, if not the highest utilized network in the UK,
not if not anywhere in the world. And I think that sort of shows that we we've made some pretty good choices in that regard, but we continue to look optimize that what we're doing to make sure we've got the very best sense Tod Can I just ask a provocative question, right, and I'm coming from the user perspective here which is that I look at a large amount of the EV chargers that have been built now I think these are going to be
stranded assets. And the reason I say that is they're just not fit for purpose going forward. And I'd said it at the beginning that there's one particular utility where I just will not go on near one of their charges. But I've got one of the oil companies, I won't go near their chargers either,
and I know that there are other guys that think the same. So the result of it, then is what you're going to have is, I think is you're going to see a whole pile of EV chargers that have got high capacity utilization factors and lo as was my question to you really is whether you believe that's the case. And then secondly, what does that mean from the investment point of view, because that that what I'm sort of saying to
you is that EV charging networks are completely different than each other. I've always believed there will be a time where there are huge of electric vehicle charges, you know, many options for customers, and actually I believe that time is fast approaching. People are concerned that there aren't enough charges at the moment enough charges in the right locations. But there are organizations like grid Serve and others
that are delivering them very very quickly, as I highlighted earlier. And so if you assume from the beginning that there's going to be competition, which is a good thing, it's a very healthy thing for this industry, then you really need to think from the beginning of how can you be the one that attracts customers. So we always think very carefully about both the charger type and I'll come back to them at that in a second, but also the locations
themselves. I've made it a priority to ensure that any location has rest facilities as restrooms, you know, available within the vicinity that you'd be able to get a coffee, for example. It's a safe place, it's got good lighting and so on and so forth. And so you want to have a really good environment that will attract people because it's a comfortable place to be. You know, you don't get any better than that than I think in an
electric fore court. We also have high speed internet. But then the other side of it is you need to make sure that you're putting the right charger that's future proof. What I noticed because I've been doing this for ten years. Is that ten years ago it was quite standard that if you wanted to charge a car, you had to plug it into a three pin plug. And so when people started putting in seven killer what charges, they were known
as fast chargers. Then fifty killer what charges emerged and they were considered very fast at the time or rapid. And now we've seen continuations of one hundred and fifty killer watts and beyond. On what grid Server focusing on to ensure that we are future proof, that we are relevant in the future. So we not only we've got the right locations of customers, we've got the right chargers, is we've been focusing on the highest power charges that are available.
So these are typically three hundred and fifty or three hundred and sixty killer wats of power. They're capable of providing one hundred miles of charge in five minutes. Now, today's electric vehicles, you know, won't accept that level of power at least for very long. But there's new batteries that are being produced
right now that are called four sea batteries. They have a C rating of four C, which means they could be charged incredibly quickly, so you know, within the next year or two, we're going to see vehicles hitting the
streets that can provide one hundred miles of charge in five minutes. And to our view and our synopsis is if you've got a customer that you can go to a location that's really perfect for for the chargings of that customer while the vehicle is charging and they're finding a charger that is incredibly reliable, that hasn't got those poor experiences that you talked about, is easy to charge with contactless payment and other options as well that will make it even easier, and you
can charge that vehicle as quickly as that vehicle needs to be charged for that location. But that's where you're going to win. And I focused on the higher power charges because that's the majority of what it is that we're doing, because we've been really focusing on the motorway network in particular and electric four courts.
But there are other scenarios, as I talked about, in cities and other locations where you actually don't want to charge a vehicle in ten to fifteen minutes because you know the need of the customer is they want to be there for an hour or several hours, and it's really important that you match the charging needs at the location with the chargers and the right location in the customer
experience. And it's the combination of all of those factors which is important to give people the confidence, give a good experience and also over time, differentiate ourselves from other solutions. So you started talking about tech and if we open a charging budd, I don't know you call that as the tech change a lot in the past three four years. Do you see a kind of stabilization?
And then probably talk about the software also, how do you see it changing, because of course we get the energy management system and of course the payment system. So what podcasts have you seen and where are we heading here? There's been a huge amount of change. The charges that we replaced from the original electric highway were the kind of things that the technology that we were used to ten years ago. That you buy equipment and that is what it
is. The new charges that we are putting in a very much like the new vehicles where you put the charges in, but there's constant upgrades over the air to kind of optimize and prove the performance of that equipment. And grids that are very focused on that we've got a lot of focus on technology,
We've got a lot of focus on providing a good experience. There's a lot of complexity to provide a good charging experience because people think that a bit like when you're fueling a car with petrol, that you're in control, you're putting the energy from the charger into the vehicle, But actually with an electric charging experience, there's a handshake that occurs between the car and the charger, and it's actually the car that will control the charging session so that it doesn't cause
any issues for battery degradation. And there's a lot of complexity around that because there's lots of different vehicles being produced very quickly by lots of different manufacturers. There's lots of different charging solutions, and it's really important that you continue to optimize and improve that technology throughout the whole charging cycle. There's also a number
of different communications challenges. If you're using a contactless card, you have to connect that that's going to go through a whole series of different pieces of technology to be able to authorize a session and so on and so forth. So technology is absolutely key. You cannot provide an incredible charging experience without a really good grasp and control of technology. And it's also essential to have technology that you can continue to optimize on an ongoing, daily, hourly hit basis,
and that's what we're doing. So we learned from our very first projects that we bought the best equipment that we can get in the market. We turn the sites on and certain cars turned up and just there were all sorts of
challenges. And because we have worked very closely with our supply chain partners, because we work very closely with a lot of the car manufacturers, we've been between us tweaking and tweaking and tweaking and tweaking and just getting a much much better charging experience to the extent now that grid serves a pretty good reputation. I got told the other day that someone said to me, look, you know, I just wanted to thank you because my wife was a bit of
a skeptic. And then we turned up at your charging solutions and on the back of seeing what you guys are doing and got sites like Exeter where we've got twenty four high power chargers all next to each other, and they work and they're reliable, and we've got teams behind them that are monitoring everything and optimizing and improving on a constant basis, and then people repairing and you know, all the sorts of thing that's needed. You know, it gave her
the confidence to say, you know what, I'm ready now. But in answer your question, you know, technology is absolutely essential to providing a great customer experience and giving people that continued confidence. So one thing we didn't talk about is the pricing of the Killer What Hour. First of all, is the pricing the same or kind of changing by the day. Is it cheaper when it's windy or sunny? Do you look at your competitails in a mile
radius? How do you define your price for Killer what Hour? That's something that's going to evolve a lot over time. We have a very simple, single price for Killer whatever. We want to be as competitive as we possibly can. We are putting in the highest power charges that are available, and in that group we are as competitive as any. But there's lots of ways to optimize us over the future. I mentioned that we have a sum to wheel ecosystem, and actually in terms of us, we're called grid serve.
So we look at our grid connections of what we can do to optimize them we also know that to get to net zero, we need to support the grid, we need to balance the grid, and we need to do a lot of optimization. And so if there is more renewable energy that is available, then rather than renewable energy projects being curtailed, which is something really really needs to be avoided, then there should be ways that in the future we
can change pricing, and there definitely are solutions around that. So as we head more down this journey, we're certainly looking at how we can deliver dynamic pricing solutions that can vary with time of day, depending on perhaps the sites are very busy or they're less busy, or renewable energy is available. We also use batteries to kind of store that energy, so there's a whole piece. So at the moment, we've been really working on how we can provide
competitive pricing incredibly reliable charging in the structure. But as we head forward in time, we definitely think there will be a need to be able to provide dynamic pricing and optimization on an ongoing basis. So Tardington, I'd like to just maybe go forward to twenty thirty just talk to me a little bit about my experience as an EV charger and how you see it. It's quite funny
because I've got young children and all they've known is electric cars. When my daughter was four years old, she turned around and said to me, Daddy, what's petrol? It was a very funny day, and I went, do you want to car and have a look? We went to a petrol station. She thought it was the strangest thing ever. But what is that stuff? And I was kind of trying to describe it, and I was
like, well, it's kind of energy from a long time ago. Well how long ago, like kind of like dinosaur time ago, and you kind of get that energy it's actually sunlight and you put it into a car and then what do you do with it. Well, there's like a bit of a kind of bonfire in the middle of that car, and you burn it and that makes the car move. And she's like, she laughs, and
Daddy, that's silly. And I think in twenty thirty people will be looking at petrol and diesel cars in the same way that we kind of look at compact discs today. They were pretty cool at the time and we really liked them, But in twenty thirty, electric vehicles will be normal. They will be absolutely so much easier. People will be looking back fondly with some fond
memories of how he got there. In the same way, I'm sure we have fond memories of mini discs and compact discs and tapes and all the kind of things along the journey. But in twenty three, it's going to be extremely easy. It's going to be a smart, connected ecosystem and there's a very similar way to how what Tesla's been able to pioneer. Today, people are need to worry about charging. People will say I'm going from here to
here. The ecosystem will connect you to which chargers are most efficient for your journey. You will turn up your plug, your vehicle in, they'll automatically start charging, and it's just going to be a great, seamless experience that really is phenomenal, and I'm absolutely sure about that. But I think the one thing I will tell you is it's going to happen a long time before twenty thirty. Great Tarlington, really great having you in the show. Thanks
a lot. Yeah, it's great to have your drive, your enthusiasm and seeing that it takes entrepreneur to develop the Infraseructor of Tomorrow. Awesome, great to be here. Thanks everyone, sol On what's your conclusion? Oh my god, what a wild wind. He spoke so much and so fast. Now it was interesting, but I had at least tough question. I could not ask half of them. What I like about it. Tarlington is first, he talks a good game, but he also is delivering on that game.
I mean that's great. We need people like him to go up and actually do this. And he's really thinking from a customer perspective. Yeah, and they have good solutions. And I like his vision of the future. I like the story really about his daughter bringing her to a patrol station because you didn't know what it was. I mean it's nice. Yeah, it's nice. But look in the grand scheme of things, and here we need to think against not Ballard. Page one fourteen of his Slight Deck the ranking
of the largest ivy charging companies in the world. And the number one is not Tesla. They say is only number four. Tesla delivered four tel at our and the first one is Tea good in China six to what hour. It's phenomenon. Now in comparison, Great Serf is much smaller than deliver or fifty gig or what hour. But it doesn't have to be big networks,
you know, it can be original networks if they are properly developed. Absolutely absolutely, And I think this and you talk about China, the China's obviously a first mover in this whole industry and it's the because an ev automobile market in the world, and they've really made a postion to this. But listen, Europe has coming quickly behind, right, so we're going to see a huge infrastructure build out in this area in the next few years, which is
only a benefit to customers like us. Yeah. The second thing I really appreciate is this holistic approach of what the EV charging station should be, so you know, integrating solar panels and batteries and almost becoming a minigrid and being able to serve the grade and start having dynamic pricing. So it's much more
than selling electrons. It's really creating a little energy hub around the charging what was the phrase, to use some to wheel as much some to wheel, like yeah, yeah, some to wheel And he has raised a lot of money and verrapy for him, and I still don't understand the economics, like
how many cars do you need in order to start balancing your books? But that's probably for another episode, without a doubt, And that was back to my whole thing that if you have the wrong charger or the wrong location,
you're in shopple going forwarders as somebody that owns these assets. Yeah, and the fact that he's on the motorway, that's a great advantage because let's face it, who's going to charge outside the home is, as you said, people inside the cities, or it's going to be fleets, or it's going to be the guys who drive a lot and the motorways. But that means also that you need to manage seasonally diesel. So it's complex. Why do
you don't do it? Because it's much more complex than being a static utility. I think the utilities have been hoping in most countries that the government's gonna allowed them the potomos that are regulated asset base as you sure, that's the
only time that's the reality of it. And don't get me wrong, there are some great utilities a litton in terms of if I look, I've been around all of Europe at this point in time, and let car for example, if I take the Italian utility and now they do a great job. But as I said, if I look at some of their Northern European counterparties, I can't say the same, which means that within the next five years there's going to be a consolidation because some people will manage their network much better
and take care of the customer. I like that approach of being customer centric because it's exactly what Autopus is doing, and this is how you win clients. You take care of your clients, and that's what great Servi is doing and that's the future of be charging well. By the way, I think. I said on the podcast that I had just signed up for a Tesla account and I did it and I was just blown away with the speed, the quality, everything about it. And my next car is a Tesla.
Okay, good to know. We thank Aquila Capital for their continuous support. We'll see them in Berlin in two weeks time, and in the meantime, I took to you next week for minutes look forward to us. Thank you for listening to Redefining Energy. Don't forget to rate the show and subscribe on Apple, Podcast, Spotify or the platform of your choice.